So there we Psilons were, minding our own business creating a tiny stellar empire on one side of a huge game map, and we get a big advance in ship range and discover all three of our opponents:

This is random? Actually it is; it's just tremendously bad luck. Ordinarily I'd bag a game like this and start over, but this time I really couldn't do it. Here's why:

Four of my first five colonies turned out to have artifacts. And I found an inferno ultra-rich which I really wanted to colonize later. Here's how the game ended up developing, up until a few minutes ago:

The humans (to my south) turned out to be very easy to get along with. We've had a non-aggression pact and a trade relationship since the early part of the game.

The Meklars and Klackons have had an alliance since the beginning. I took out the Meklars first, and then the Klackons. Both of them are down to a handful of new, small, isolated, colonies. I used my standard early-phase ship (medium, heavy blast cannon) for the Meklars, and my standard mid-phase ship (large, autocannon, fusion bomb) against the Klackons. Meanwhile, the humans have been doing a lot of research. They've got class X planetary shields and some decent weapons. When the time comes, they're going to be interesting to fight against. I'm researching pulse phasors right now and I already have neutronium bombs, so it shouldn't be too tough. But it's going to take a while to build a fleet capable of handling them. None of my existing ships are up to the job.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 12:57 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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My favorite MOO weapon in the early going is the heavy blast cannon. It's the double-sized version of the neutron blaster. It's weapon tech level 15, so it doesn't take all that long to reach it, especially if you put half your research into weapons. It does 3-24 damage and has a range of 2.

In the early going it's a very potent weapon. When I get it, I build medium ships. They get one heavy blast cannon, plus the best targeting computer I have, plus the fastest star drive. If there's any space left, I fill it with armor. (Sometimes I include a nuclear bomb instead, or a speed-2 system drive.) The resulting ship usually costs between 80 and 90 BC, and a reasonably well built out planet can produce several per turn.

I tend to use swarms of them, which isn't hard considering how cheap they are. And of course eventually an opponent can gain something that makes their lives miserable -- say, scatterpack VII fired from a large number of missile bases. But most enemy planets aren't defended like that, and 40-100 of these ships can take out defending fleets (if they don't run like rabbits) without too much difficulty.

10 or so makes a good guard fleet on annihilated planets to prevent them from being recolonized. 20 can do a good job of protecting one of my planets that isn't yet capable of defending itself.

Naturally, this design doesn't play all the way through to the end of the game. But it's usually the first warship I build, and it can go a long way towards stabilizing a strategic situation after I meet an aggressive AI. It's also capable of completely wiping out the first opponent I run into, and that's usually how I use it.

My favorite weapon in the mid-game is the Auto Blaster, tech level 28. It fires 3 times and does 4-16 damage on each shot. Which is pretty damned good for a weapon that takes half as much space as the heavy blast cannon. By this point in the game I'm building large ships instead, and you can easily pack 6-10 of these into a single hull without skimping on shields or other useful stuff (e.g. the battle scanner). 20 such ships is a formidable force, and 100 is unstoppable. 4 make a decent guard squadron for annihilated planets.

My favorite weapon in the end-game is the Mauler Device. They're entirely too much fun. The Death Ray (the weapon you get from Orion after you beat the Guardian) does a lot more damage but it's not really very good; it takes too much room, for one thing.

But the single coolest beam weapon in the game is the Crystal Ray. You can't get it legally, but it's possible to hack the save file to get it. (I used to know how to do that, but I don't remember any more.)

I don't tend to use missiles mainly because I don't like weapons that run out. And I don't use torpedoes because I don't like weapons that can't be fired every turn. (And whose damage decays with range.)

Also, missiles are too damned big. Neutron Blaster is weapon tech 15; Merculite missiles are tech 14. The Heavy Blast Cannon is size 60; a 2-missile Merculite launcher is 105. The 5-missile launcher is about 160. (The actual size in the ship  is a function of your tech level, but the relative size always remains the same.)

It's true that the missiles have longer range, but they're only doing 10 points of damage if they hit.

So I research good missiles gladly when I can, but only because I need them for missile bases. By the time you get class-V planetary shields and Stinger missiles (or something better), a reasonable planet becomes very difficult and very expensive to crack. I had the Amoeba attack one of my planets and my missile bases destroyed it before it got close enough to the planet to fire back. (I think that was Pulson missiles.)

Missiles are superb for defense, but I don't put them into my ships. It's all beams and bombs for me.

UPDATE: Research strategies figure into this. Early in the game I put everything into propulsion until I get at least range 5 and at least warp 3. Ultimately there just isn't any substitute for fast, long-legged ships, for colonization or for war.

My usual steady-state research is:

computers 20% (i.e. 10 clicks)
construction 20%
force fields 10% (i.e. 5 clicks)
planetology 20%
propulsion 10%
weapons 20%

...but of course by that point I'm usually at propulsion level 10 or more and everything else is at 1. But I've been known to run 50% weapons and 10% for each of the others, when I get hints that an enemy is coming and I haven't gotten the Neutron Blaster yet.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 09:05 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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They can do stuff like this:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 09:22 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Here's something I've always wondered about:

Why are those two colony ships different costs?

All five of the starting designs cost more than they would if you made them yourself in the Design frame.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 01:07 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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1 Obviously you are bypassing the kickbacks in the normal procurement system as well as shopping around . 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at May 23, 2010 05:49 PM (EJaOX)

2 Besides which, the original one has chrome bumpers.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 23, 2010 06:10 PM (+rSRq)

3 Cost overruns on the prototypes.

Scrapping the initial designs is always something to do as soon as possible. If one of those initial scouts gets eaten by the Guardian, I always try to tell myself that at least it makes it easier to get rid of the design. It helps...a little.

Posted by: haphazard1 at May 23, 2010 06:30 PM (xF0tu)

4 The cost of a unit is constant, after design, but as your tech level increases, older technology in that tree becomes cheaper. The Colony I ship was designed after you had made some tech advances that were relevant to the units included. Equipment also gets smaller as your tech level goes up. I think, late in the game, that it's even possible to put colony units on a small frame.

Posted by: TheShaper at May 24, 2010 09:30 AM (15wkT)

5 TheShaper is correct that tech shrinks ship components. 2% per tech level in the relevant field, IIRC. And Construction tech level affects overall hull space as well. Usually around the point where you tech Duralloy you can fit a colony base plus extended fuel tanks on a large hull and extend your colonization range, for example. But if you try it at the beginning you are well short of having enough space.

But what I believe our host was talking about is that you can create a new colony ship design (or scout, or whatever) on the very first turn before you start any research at all. And it will be cheaper than the default designs. Default scout is 10, I think, but an identical redesign costs 8 -- big savings in the early game.

Posted by: haphazard1 at May 24, 2010 12:11 PM (xF0tu)

6 Exactly so. This has nothing to do with the cost decline caused by rising technology. The image above was from before I began any research.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 24, 2010 12:14 PM (+rSRq)

7 My only guess is that the initial ship designs cost as if you had level 0 in all technologies, whereas you actually have level 1 as soon as you start the game.

Posted by: Griffin at May 24, 2010 12:31 PM (uXpoK)

8 You might be right about that. It does make sense.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 24, 2010 07:22 PM (+rSRq)

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I don't really remember MOM very well. But I remember this spell:

Armageddon:
Chaos. Global Enchantment. Casting Cost: 1250 mana;
Upkeep: 40 mana/turn. Very Rare.

Inexorably and methodically destroys both worlds. For each volcano that rises from a map square, the casting wizard gains one magic power point per game turn.

It took a long time to get it, and a hell of a lot of power to start it and keep it going. But after a while it paid for itself, and it was amazing to see the entire world except for your own territory getting turned into volcanoes. I remember a couple of times where I let it run long enough to pretty much convert the entire world.

Of course, it makes everyone else utterly pissed off at you, but by that point I was already on everyone's shit list, so it didn't matter.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 09:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I just bought Duke Nukem 3D and Master of Magic.

Somewhere around here I have a couple of CDs which contain a backup of the DN3D directory I used to have. Reason I'd want to find it again is that it contains about 300 good single-player levels I colllected over a couple of years. But I was looking for it earlier and couldn't find it. Moan, I hope it isn't gone forever. That would really suck.

UPDATE: But before I make any kind of attempt to play MOM, I'm gonna read the whole manual, and then the entire spell book. The biggest drawback of MOM is that it has a steep learning curve.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 08:41 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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We're well into the game here. My Klackons currently own 32 planets (in a "huge" playing field) and my average tech is about 25. I was deeply worried about the Psilons, since I didn't encounter them for a long time. When I finally found them, they only had a single planet. They hadn't done any colonies.

Guess why? That green star, which is the only one within 3 parsecs of Mentar, turns out to be Orion. Everything they've sent in has gotten destroyed by the Guardian -- and because of that, the star remains unscouted, and it's the obvious choice for their next attempt to create a colony since it's so close.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how most of the races were no fun to play. Just for the hell of it I tried playing the Bulrathi, and in fact they were a lot of fun. I had a big tech advantage over the stinking Humans, and one time I invaded a planet of theirs with a population of 80, using only 40 attackers. And I won without any losses. It was hilarious.

I don't completely understand the Klackon racial advantage. The Meklars can operate two more factories per colonist than anyone else, so when they're nominally at "Robotic Controls IV" then they're really at "Robotic Controls VI".

But if I read the description properly, the Klackons produce twice as much for a given planet than anyone else would with the same planet and the same number of factories. Is that really how it works? Because than means that "Robotic Controls IV" effectively is "Robotic Controls IX" -- and that's scary.

UPDATE: The computer I used to play this on had a SoundBlaster AWE32 in it, which for the time was a pretty good MIDI synth. It was certainly a whole hell of a lot better than the SB-16.

DosBox emulates an SB-16, and it really sounds cheesy. Looking through the documentation, it seems as if it also emulates a Gravis UltraSound, which was another half-way decent MIDI synth. Does anyone know if that really does work, and if MOO will work with it? I know that my sound module (USB2, but very sophisticated) will have no trouble doing decent MIDI. But will DosBox use it? And what do I have to do to DosBox and to MOO itself to make it all work?

I'm a bit afraid to try it on my own, for fear of not being able to find my way back if I louse up. But it sure would be neat if the music sounded better.

UPDATE: Another thing I want to know is if it's possible to make DosBox scale the window up 2:1. Right now it's the size you see above, which is only 640*480 plus the bezel. If it was twice that size it still wouldn't fill my display, but it would be a lot more comfortable to look at.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 09:43 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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In Master of Orion for me, at least, the only two races worth playing are the Psilons and the Meklar. The others make interesting opponents, often very challenging opponents, but their racial advantages don't really work as well for me as a player.

But yesterday I wondered if that really was true, so I tried a game as the Silicoids. Playing them really requires a significant change in strategy.

The Silicoid advantages are that they can colonize any kind of planet without any of the advanced Planetology technologies, and they don't care about industrial wastes, so you don't have to research the technologies which reduce technological wastes, and you don't have to apply any production to Eco except when you're terraforming a planet.

The disadvantage, and it's really a big one, is that Silicoid population growth is half that of other races.

The early strategy for the Silicoids is to spread like weeds. When you get a couple of decent planets and start building up, build lots of colony ships and grab just about every planet within reach. More planets means more places to breed people, and you're gonna need them.

My opponents ended up being the Sakkra and the Psilons, just about the most dangerous possible for the Silicoids to face. The Sakkra are the opposite: they breed twice as fast as normal, four times as fast as the Silicoids. And the Psilons have the edge in tech, if they utilize it.

I was playing on a Huge playing field, and I didn't encounter the Psilons for a long time. I had nightmares of them being way ahead of me technologically and also spread like weeds, but it hadn't happened. I couldn't go looking  for them, though, because I was caught in a finish fight with the Sakkra, and couldn't really stop.

As the Silicoids, once you find an opponent you've got to kill them off. If you let them alone, they'll out-breed you and then out-everything-else you. All the Silicoid advantages become less and less important as the game continues, and the opposition gain technologies giving them the same things. But your breeding disadvantage continues for the entire game.

I kind of hoped that when I got Atmospheric Terraforming (turn all planets into Gaias) that it would help, but was shocked when it turned out I couldn't use it. If you're the Silicoids, once you have it, it gets ignored. I also got cloning but never even tried it; I bet it wouldn't work either. Besides which, that one comes very late and by that point I didn't need the help.

But through most of the game, most of my planets weren't full. Between shipping colonists to newly-colonized planets, and shipping soldiers to one planet that revolted, and all the cases where I conquered enemy planets, I ended up running behind on bodies all through the game. It was kind of freaky, actually.

Actually, now that I think of it, maybe the Bulrathi would be fun to play. They get a huge advantage in ground combat, and that could be interesting.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 11:29 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I've been spending a lot of time playing Master of Orion. Yesterday I tried MOO2, and gave up after about ten minutes. I remember with MOO2 came out, and I bought it, and it never grabbed me then either.

MOO, though; it's the perfect blend of ease of play and complicated and interesting play. One of the strokes of genius Barcia included in it is the way that you don't get every research item each time you play. Sometimes you can get the ones you're missing by trading with the computer players, or better yet stealing it from them.

I ran into that today. I was playing the Meklars, against the Sakkra and the Psilons, and I got about half way through the game and hadn't gotten a single one of the "reduce pollution" technologies. Most of my planets were well developed and something like 60% of their economic output was in Eco to keep the pollution under control. I ended up restructuring my research to put most of the effort into Construction, as well as cranking up the espionage on the Psilons, and invading a couple of Psilon planets, in hopes of capturing something, anything, to try to get the pollution  under control.

The Psilons had another surprise for me. They were being nasty, and also starting to spread like weeds, and I decided they needed to be "trimmed back" a bit. So I sent a group of my latest, best warships to visit one of their better planets. And to my shock, my ship was hardly able to scratch the planet. I was using a low-level beam of some kind, and they had built up some pretty incredible planetary shields. Fortunately for me their missiles were crap, so the battle was a penny-ante attrition fight. I didn't particularly care to spend fifteen minutes pecking away at him, especially since I wasn't sure I'd be the winner. So I shut down production of that ship model and designed a new one. With heavy phasors, baby, and fusion bombs. That one worked a lot better.

I think the Meklars are my favorite race to play, though the Psilons are probably a close second. Among players of the game there's no consensus as to which race is the best one -- though there's general consensus that the Mrrshan are the worst. Certainly they're the least formidable when the computer plays them.

The Bulrathi bonus in ground combat can be a bit of a shock, or at least it was for me the first time I tried invading a Bulrathi planet, even though I had a technological advantage.

The Psilon research advantage, though, is really scary. The Darlok advantage in espionage is great. But the Meklar advantage in production is IMHO the best, because high production is the virtue from which all other virtues flow. In my most recent game, it didn't take me long to surpass the Psilons technologically, even though they had a lot of planets.

Depending on the situation, the Silicoids can be a real headache as an opponent. It depends on how long it takes before you find them. If it's quite a while (and generally that's what I prefer, myself) you'll discover that they have colonized every planet within reach and probably own a couple which are "rich" and maybe one "ultra rich".

On the other hand, that can be rather nice. Once the Silicoids have colonized a planet, you can conquer and invade even if you don't have the technology to colonize planets of that type. And the Silicoid breeding disadvantage can be a real handicap.

It was hard to play-balance the races and they didn't really do a very good job of it. I gather that in MOO2 they changed that quite a lot. But in MOO the races are enough different to keep them interesting, and not so out of balance as to make the game unreasonable.

As to the Humans? Bah! Waste off time. Who wants to be a human?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 07:08 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I played through and won a game of MOO last night, in a large galaxy, at simple setting, with just one opponent. I played the brainy guys (man, they're fun!) and my opponent turned out to be the Alkari.

I'll move up in difficulty later, but I'm still learning the game. After all this time I hardly remember it. For instance, I got caught by surprise when I found the Orion system and fought the Guardian the first time. I honestly had completely forgotten about that!

My scout had a scanner, so I took a look at the specs, and got a bit intimidated. I put off trying to attack it until I could build a battlewagon I thought was able to compete. Ended up with 20 of those, and tried it.

And the Guardian went down in my first shot. It was 20 ships, each of which carried 11 proton torpedoes (and a 11 heavy ion cannons), and they vaporized it with their first salvo of torpedoes. I didn't lose a single ship. I really overestimated how dangerous it was. I now suspect that just one of my battlewagons could have handled it. (I think I kept a saved game just before that attack; maybe I'll try it and see.)

Maybe I was mixed up with the amoeba or the star crystal. I think those guys are a lot stronger than the Guardian.

MOO locked up on me twice. Fortunately, the game auto-saves every few turns, so I was able to restart the game and "continue" without having lost very much.

There was one advanced ship feature I remember really liking a lot which permitted a ship to teleport to any empty square on the tactical map, but I don't remember what it was called. It wasn't in my research tree this time. I did get the Mauler Device, which I vaguely remember was a lot of fun, but by that point the game was such a mismatch that it wasn't worth going on. I ended up sending just one of those battle wagons I designed for the Guardian into each of the two Alkari worlds, and they won easily.

Remember when I bought Civ 4? I installed it and played with it for an evening, and never ran it again. It's gorgeous. It's also too damned intricate. It's too complicated. If you learned the Civ series over a period of years, upgrading each time to the newer, more complicated version, maybe it wouldn't be such a challenge. But for me, coming into it cold after more than ten years, well it seemed more like work than play.

MOO hits a different point in the curve. The research tree and the kinds of things you get from research aren't so elaborate. They're easier to understand and easier to keep track of. I was hooked on this game back in the day, and I'm pretty sure I'll be hooked again.

The Good Old Games package I bought also included MOO2, but I'm not even going to look at it until I'm back up to speed on MOO, and becoming bored with it. That may take months.

It may never happen at all. Master of Orion is a masterpiece, one of the best PC games ever. It is an example of why I love 4X games.

All together now: Explore! Expand! Exploit! Exterminate!

UPDATE: I remembered wrong:

UPDATE: No, I guess I didn't underestimate the Guardian after all. One of those battlewagons got creamed. 4 of them got creamed. 11 of them won, but lost 4 in doing so.

When I originally played the game, I took 20 in, and they won without losses.

UPDATE: I have a vague memory that when you were in the main screen, there was something you could click, or some key combination you could hit, which would allow you to cycle through all your planets in order. Am I remembering wrong? What was it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 10:10 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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1 I can't remember if it was MOO, but I remember reading somewhere that one of the early 4X games heavily favored numbers over power, such that you could break the game by defeating certain enemies way early.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 22, 2010 10:30 AM (/YIPx)

2 *looks up*  Yep, I think it was MOO.

I've encountered similar situations in other games ( including P&P RPGs! ), where the name of the game is "prevent any return fire."  If you can throw enough weak shots at a strong enemy to kill them quick ( or at least force them to abort to dodging ), you can beat them.  If you can't, they use their vastly higher firepower to one-shot your guys.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 22, 2010 10:34 AM (/YIPx)

3 No, it wasn't this one. For one thing, it takes a long time before you even encounter any of your enemies, because you have to research extended range for your ships.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 10:36 AM (+rSRq)

4 Congratulations on the first win.  I hope you keep having fun with it.

If memory serves (it's been a couple of years since I played), the Guardian gets significantly stronger at higher difficulty settings.  In particular, I'm pretty sure it gets one of the anti-missile specials.  So if you were on Simple, then it probably actually was weaker than you remembered.

I think the hotkeys you want are F2 and F3.

Yeah, I don't think MoO is imbalanced in favor of huge stacks of weak ships.  It's certainly a viable option, as it should be, but there are lots of countermeasures -- good battle computers, repulsor beams, certain weapons.  Most critically, the computer opponents are smart enough to deploy those countermeasures if you start using fighter swarms.  And that's one of the most impressive things about MoO.  Has there ever been a strategy game with a better AI?

Posted by: Griffin at April 22, 2010 12:53 PM (3WecZ)

5

I've heard lots of people who say that the AI in Stardock's "Galactic Civilizations" is supposed to be extremely good.

And there was a turn-based game about railroads which got converted into a computer game (I don't recall the name, but I know that one aspect of it was that there wasn't any chance to it) and I heard that the computer players in that one were excellent.

I always thought that the MOO AI's were pretty good, but I never thought of them as being remotely as good as a human player.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 01:23 PM (+rSRq)

6 Yes, F2 and F3 are exactly what I was remembering! Thanks!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 01:25 PM (+rSRq)

7 Yeah, GCII has extremely good AI.  It used to have an option where the AI would use all the free CPU power available.  Stardock actually took that feature out in a later patch, because as computers advanced over just a few years, it became pointlessly excessive.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 22, 2010 07:32 PM (/YIPx)

8 >And there was a turn-based game about railroads

Ticket to Ride?

http://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/

Posted by: cuc at April 22, 2010 09:51 PM (T3aZT)

9 I'm posting this even as it violates the "unsolicited suggestion" rule, because a Civ player is morally obliged to do it...

The crowning achievements of Civ-type games are Alpha Centauri (by Brian Reynolds, the designer behind Civ2) and Master of Magic (by Steve Barcia, the designer behind MOO).

Phew, I've said it.

Posted by: cuc at April 22, 2010 09:57 PM (T3aZT)

10

I figured it out: it was 1830.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 22, 2010 10:04 PM (+rSRq)

11 cuc, MOM will be out on GOG next week.

Expect Steven to disappear entirely once that happens.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2010 12:08 AM (PiXy!)

12

Personally, I am still waiting for Darklands to come out from the Microprose back catalog.

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at April 23, 2010 06:13 AM (BUHwO)

13 I don't think I ever played the original MOO, but I can't even begin to tally the number of hours I blew on MOO2.  I suspect I'll be getting that combo and throwing any chance of sleep or productivity out the window this weekend.  I never played MOM for some reason, but from what people are saying here I plan to get that one when it comes out.  I've considered getting CIV4 as well, but I need to dig through my old CD binders first and see which is the last version I have, I remember I didn't like it much at all in that version, but I suspect that was one of the variants of Civ III.

The AI in 1830 probably seemed pretty impressive to a casual player, and the fact that it could be made to do well in a game with that kind of depth is an impressive, but to say 'excellent' would be quite a stretch, I was in the middle levels of the west coast tournament set back when and I could beat it in my sleep, and what some of the better players I knew could do to the poor AI was just ridiculous.

Posted by: David at April 23, 2010 07:36 AM (H5/LU)

14

Actually, one title I do not imagine will come out from the Microprose back catalog (Due to copyright issues.), but would be excited if it did, is Red Storm Rising.  Arguably the best blend of realism and playability in a modern submarine simulation.

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at April 23, 2010 05:18 PM (BUHwO)

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